Pat Casey, the chief technology officer and EVP of development operations at ServiceNow, wasn’t always a technologist.
He first went to college to be an engineer, but switched his major to biology after becoming disillusioned with engineering after realizing, “I could spend my whole career in the US, and you built like one bridge. It just wasn’t a lot of infrastructure, in my perception, being built.”
Casey later pursued a PhD program for neurophysiology while working at Aldus PageMaker, a desktop publishing company. Aldus, which was later bought by Adobe, put Casey to work in IT. He would install mail onto a computer, reset someone’s password, or help another to figure out why their C drive wasn’t working.
“I remember I woke up one morning, sometime [in] my second year as a graduate student, and I was just in this horrible mood,” Casey said. “Then I realized I had my days wrong, it’s actually one of the days I was going into the office…My mood lifted. I’m suddenly looking forward to the day.”
Shortly after this epiphany, Casey dropped out of the neurophysiology program and took a full-time position at Aldus.
From rain to shine. Casey found himself working for Adobe in Seattle. He said that others had told him the dreariness of the Pacific Northwest was going to get to him, but he figured that was just to keep Californians from moving there.
By the second winter, the weather was starting to get to him.
“The weather was so depressing for me, I don’t know a better way to put it,” Casey said. “It got so bad that I would actually get in my car and I would drive out to the top of the Snoqualmie Pass just to get in the sun, like stop at the side of the road.”
A friend of Casey’s got in touch with him because their software company Peregrine Systems in San Diego was hiring in its engineering department. Casey said the weather in San Diego was appealing, and that “I’d love to be in engineering instead of IT.”
Fred Luddy, who was serving as Peregrine’s chief technology officer, interviewed Casey for the position. Luddy would later begin ServiceNow, where Casey now works.
Luddy was inspired to begin ServiceNow after working for Modernfold Doors, where he worked on the order entry system. Luddy worked to automate the process for putting orders in their system and presented it to an employee whose job it was to manually type in delivery addresses.
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“For [Luddy], that was a trivial piece of work, for her, that had meaningfully changed her life for the better,” Casey said.
After working at Peregrine for a few years, Casey decided to start his own company writing maintenance management software.
Just me, myself, and I. Casey sold the company he started to the Peregrine customer base because he knew them and because it was a reseller group. The company would sell his product, and both he and Peregrine would profit.
“Hopefully, everybody won, including the customers,” Casey said.
He said that for the first six months of working on his own, it was “glorious.” As a “super strong introvert,” he was productive, but also felt himself going into a “small hole of introversion.”
“I realized that, independent of the economics of it, I needed to be in a working environment to have people around me, which was really important—at least it was for me,” Casey said.
“I think I have a really strong need to have other people in my life…For me, being at work, it’s one of the ways I get to meet people.”
Casey joined ServiceNow in 2004, motivated by what Luddy was doing at the company and that Casey would get to work with people again, “as opposed to working with myself from the couch.”
Casey also said he didn’t join the company “because my goal in life is to be part of a really successful, multi-billion dollar software company.” He said that it was important for him to work in an environment with a positive culture, and that “the work we were doing helped a human being.”
All together now. Michele Richards, the SVP of impact engineering at ServiceNow and the Unified Technology Group (a group of technical or technical-adjacent employees who aim to help customer experience) project management officer, said that after being at the company for 10 years, Casey has taken on larger, public roles over time.
“Now he’s on stage…and he’s really accepted, as his role has grown, that people do want to see him,” Richards said. “If he’s in the UTG Connect and you’re in a social event, he will really work the room.”
“He has really grown from being a real introvert, hands on keyboard [and] head down, to being this impressive leader.”